Forcing the files to download using htaccess

If we want to put a functionality in our website to download files, the best and easiest way to do it is to have it in htaccess.

By default, the files will open up to your current page or open up a tab when clicked via target="_blank" attribute. Well, that is for me not a good experience, most especially if your website is a downloading site.

You can also try to make a script to force the files to download either via php, asp, or any language, but that will be tedious.

Why do you need to be hard on yourself if you can do it fast and easy.

Please see below syntax that you can put in on your htaccess to force the file to download on your website.

AddType application/force-download .csv
AddType application/force-download .xls
AddType application/force-download .doc
AddType application/force-download .docx
AddType application/force-download .avi
AddType application/force-download .mpg
AddType application/force-download .mov
AddType application/force-download .wav
AddType application/force-download .zip
AddType application/force-download .mp3
AddType application/force-download .pdf


Hope this helps. Thank you for reading such a short post.

Setting up dynamic sub domain via httpd.conf or htaccess

This post will teach you how to setup dynamic sub domain on your server.

We actually have 2 options on how to do it, maybe 3 which uses cpanel if allowed on your account.
Anyway, what I'll be discussing is the setup via httpd.conf or via .htaccess file.

To do this via httpd.conf, you only need to create a virtualhost with ServerAlias as below.
<VirtualHost>
    DocumentRoot /www/subdomain
    ServerName www.domain.tld
    ServerAlias *.domain.tld
</VirtualHost>


To do this via .htaccess, create the htaccess file on the www/ directory where your subdomains will be placed.

RewriteCond %{ENV:REDIRECT_SUBDOMAIN} =""
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([a-z0-9][-a-z0-9]+)\.domain\.com\.?(:80)?$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%1 -d
RewriteRule ^(.*) %1/$1 [E=SUBDOMAIN:%1,L]
RewriteRule ^ - [E=SUBDOMAIN:%{ENV:REDIRECT_SUBDOMAIN},L]


Hope this helps. Thanks!

Resolution: Codeigniter HTACCESS with GoDaddy NOT working.

I'm having problems with GoDaddy web hosting when I used Codeigniter as my framework in developing my site. All the pages I made are can't be found and it seems like that my .htaccess is NOT working and the page always echo the message "No input file specified."

As per Codeigniter documentation, by default, the index.php file will be included in your URLs:

example.com/index.php/news/article/my_article

And you can easily change the URL and do mod_rewrite using .htaccess. See below.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php/$1 [L]

Unfortunately, this is NOT working with GoDaddy, and to resolve this, instead having the above .htaccess, your entry should be like this.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|images|robots\.txt)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?$1 [L]


Hope this helps you as well.